A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.

This Internetnews.com article makes a good point: DragonFly has thrived since splitting from FreeBSD 5+ years ago, and the difference between the systems is more apparent now, with the introduction of DevFS and Hammer.

3 Comments on The split becomes noticeable

Well, there are other great things, when you compare FreeBSD and DragonFly.

For example that I was really happy when DragonFly fixed the USB stuff and FreeBSD still crashed when I pulled out my stick.

I also think the DragonFly people are doing tons of tiny, simple things to make your life easier. For example the Makefile in /usr. I don’t know, if this is also in FreeBSD, but the add user command also is cool, because it allows you to select your shell in a safe manner and also pulls in installed shells from pkgsrc. I often read about people having problems and are not able to login again. This is especially a problem, if you can only access a system via SSH (and therefore can’t login as root).

Last but not least it always supported my hardware better. I don’t really understand this, because the FreeBSD people have a larger developer and user base.

I really can’t stop to thank the developers to create such a painless operating system.

FreeBSD has had DevFS for a long time. I’m not the only FreeBSD user who’d like to see Hammer ported and as far as I understand it DFly developers want to see Hammer ported to lots of platforms as well. It will help improve Hammer if there’s more users and it is deployed on more systems (FreeBSD will have a larger user base for awhile to come IMHO). Matt has even gone to some trouble to help make Hammer portable and I bet he would even help port it to FreeBSD once some of the changes due for FreeBSD code base have been made and stuff is arranged to make Hammer easier to add. The Hammer docs and lists even document some of the changes needed in FreeBSD to make this happen.

Right now ZFS is pretty much production ready in FreeBSD and may even become the default in 9.0. I’d personally sort of like to see more plain jane journaling and redundancy handled at the GEOM layer in FreeBSD so that UFS could remain the default forever but …. :-\